Baseball: The Day the Old Pros Won

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Sports fans, like 19th century novelists and Avis executives, believe in handicap justice. And when No. 2 man ages heroics despite hardship, the cheering section becomes legion. Of the 200 million or so people tuned in to the Se ries around the world last week, the folks in St. Louis and unreconstructed admirers of expert, well-rounded baseball teams were rooting for the Cardinals. Just about everybody else was discovering why the Red Sox—a 200-to-1 shot for the American League pennant and a 2-to-3 underdog in the Series—had cost Boston its Brahmin cool all summer long. As the Sox, down one game to three, incredibly fought to tie it all up at 3-3, the carillon of Boston's Park Street Church pealed out The Impossible Dream, the city's No. 1 ecclesiastical fan—Richard Cardinal Gushing—bestowed a blessing on the team, and the Boston fire department announced that it would sound every siren it owned the minute the Red Sox won the seventh and final game.

Sweet Revenge. Impossible dreams have a way of ending. In that seventh game, Manager Red Schoendienst's cool, precisely professional Cardinals picked up and flew away with the Series, giving Boston only three hits and two runs, while clobbering five pitchers for ten hits and seven runs themselves.

Red Sox Triple Crown Slugger Carl Yastrzemski, with nine hits and three homers in the first six games, managed only a single in four trips to the plate. Righthander Jim Lonborg, trying for a third Series victory on two days rest, came out wild and weary. Manager Dick Williams kept praying until the sixth inning, then mercifully took him out. By then, St. Louis had a six-run lead and the game was long gone.

For the Cards, it was sweet revenge against the youngster who had handled them like Little Leaguers in his two previous starts. Every Redbird but Orlando Cepeda got on base. There was Shortstop Dal Maxvill, only .227 for the season, booming out a tremendous triple to start everything off in the third inning. And Castoff Yankee Roger Maris, driving in still another run, his seventh of the Series, to prove that he's the money player everybody said he wasn't. And Second Baseman Julian Javier, batting cleanup by default during Cepeda's slump and pounding out a three-run, sixth-inning homer. Then there was Lou Brock. In six games, he had collected ten hits, stolen four bases and scored seven runs. So in the seventh he rapped out two more hits—and proceeded to steal three more bases, thus breaking a Series record set way back in 1909 by Honus Wagner. "My boy Lou," said Red, "stole everything but the lobster from Boston Harbor."